Mostly vibe-coded Apple Containers front-end that I'd like to use myself. But if others want to use it, here's the source code.
_doctor_love12 hours ago
My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
I had an idea like this and thought I could vibe code it, but then I figured someone else would care more and do it first. I was right!
This looks like a great app and I'm excited to try it out.
Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
More awesome: let me provision multiple user accounts inside the VM and restrict filesystem / network policy by user. Then I can have a dev agent, QA agent, etc. each with its own view of the work. That would be a powerful base layer for further automation.
Of course I should be able to provision various resources "attached" to the VM that agents can use on a permissioned basis; e.g., DB, queue, external volume, and so forth.
mkagenius5 hours ago
> Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
You can do exactly that with coderunner
_doctor_love35 minutes ago
Nice! I will be sure to check it out. IMHO it's a good thing if there's a bit of competition.
rao-v7 hours ago
I threw something like this together w a simple browser front end, mostly because I like running mid to large open models but can’t trust them to not go insane. Will share at some point soon
_doctor_love35 minutes ago
Look forward to seeing it!
RossBencina9 hours ago
> Free idea: ...
I have been thinking about this too. Is it not as simple as installing Claude in the VM and connecting via an SSH terminal, or if you want a GUI use VSCode with the Remote SSH extension, which will give you the file browser UI etc. Presumably you can extensions in the VSCode Claude/whatever chat extensions in the VM too.
Willaminan hour ago
> as simple as installing Claude in the VM and connecting via an SSH terminal
I've done exactly this, and it works pretty well!
1. I setup a VM in UTM (but this could be any kind of containerization thing). I don't even bother with a non-root account in there (the agent has free rein to install packages, write files, etc). 2. I SSH into the container. 3. I install Claude or whatever there. 4. I setup git things in a way where I can push/pull to move code between the container and my host machine.
Upsides: the agent is isolated from the rest of my host system, only being able to read/write what I've explicitly handed to it. Downsides: the agent is isolated from the rest of my host system, so it's more limited in capability.
_doctor_love34 minutes ago
UTM is undefeated for me, especially in combination with Vagrant. What I'm hoping for is a polished turn-key solution version of all this.
tart is also an option I like a lot, but it's macOS only.
andrew-waters5 hours ago
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cindyllm12 hours ago
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joohwan2 hours ago
What stood out to me more than this particular project is the visible acceleration of a phenomenon many of us could foresee, especially over the last year or so: people can build a version of the same idea faster than ever.
After like 10 minutes of searching I found multiple similar swift projects (most of them are just a couple of weeks or months old):
https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app https://github.com/nico81/iContainer https://github.com/wouterdebie/davit https://github.com/Augani/dory https://github.com/tofa84/berth https://github.com/erdaltoprak/ContainerUtility https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard
There were more if you include ones with fewer GitHub stars, CLI-only, non-Swift etc. but you get the idea.
People will increasingly be able to build their own version of the software they want. As that happens the value of someone else's decreases. The era of hyper-personal software is coming.
NSUserDefaultsan hour ago
Not on iOS unless you also pay annual membership to put it on the AppStore OR rebuild & reinstall the personal-account build every 30 or so days.
simonw19 hours ago
This looks like a really solid app. I like that it's 17 MB and uses the ContainerAPIClient library directly.
28 commits in 3 days, 5,015 lines of Swift, every commit "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5".
Also neat that it's signed/notarized. I installed it and it downloaded the necessary container platform stuff on first launch.
Suggestion: add a getting started tutorial to the site which suggests an image to try out and has screenshots (or a silent video) showing you how to get that image up and running and what you can do with it.
The create image dialog suggests "nginx:latest" but that's not a great starting demo.
thefourthchime17 hours ago
The AI-Maxing copy on the website kind of gave it away. Doesn't mean is not a great app though!
satvikpendem13 hours ago
The description of this submission that literally says "Mostly vibe-coded" didn't give it away?
Hamuko3 hours ago
You don't see the submission description when you open the link from the front page.
amelius5 hours ago
Can't someone vibe-code a MacOS that runs on Linux?
throwitaway22214 hours ago
I think we're past the point where agentic coding is a given now.
danpalmer14 hours ago
Coding yes, copywriting, design, identity, no. Using AI doesn't mean giving up on quality, unless you don't care about quality. Most of these issues come from folks who don't really care about quality and ship the first slop that comes out.
Klonoar8 hours ago
> Using AI doesn't mean giving up on quality
Look, I'm as anti-AI as the next guy but their homepage is good. They didn't compromise on quality.
Call a spade a spade.
tomgp7 hours ago
I think the issue is that the prose on the homepage gives off AI marketing BS "Everything you'd expect. Nothing you don't." "Native down to the pixels" etc. in an age where the web is stuffed full of low value llm generated content this is a strong negative signal for me (and i suspect others). No reflection on the app itself which I've yet to try but seems like a great idea
RossBencina6 hours ago
> Most of these issues come from folks who don't really care about quality and ship the first slop that comes out.
Brings to mind The Show's "ugly MySpace" episode: https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-083
It would be nice if everyone prioritised, and was capable of, shipping polished products. But more likely the apps you're bemoaning come from folks who are not product designers. Even prior to genAI there were plenty of developers (myself included) who had patchy competence in some subset of {copywriting, documentation information architecture, visual design, identity, UI/UX, ...}. I know good developers for whom UI coherence is "not their problem," although they know well enough that it needs to be someone's problem. "Programmer art" is also a thing. I would argue that the non-coding parts of many open-source projects are what lets them down, and when it is good it is usually documentation that impresses me the most. But I think Ze Frank's view might be that, given the sudden drop in barriers to entry, it is amazing that everyone is having a go and trying to express themselves.
throwitaway22210 hours ago
Agreed
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xinitop16 hours ago
Great suggestion. Coming up.
joka88xj9 hours ago
A tutorial with a slightly more realistic example would help a lot here. nginx:latest shows the plumbing works, but it doesn’t really show where Apple Containers feels different from Docker Desktop or OrbStack.
Something like a tiny app with a volume, port mapping, and a simple rebuild loop would make the value much easier to see.
kylemclaren6 hours ago
Ha! Looks like we built the same thing: https://container-ui.fly.dev/
Now I wish I hadn't burned all those tokens!
andrew-waters5 hours ago
Oh hi there - I just noticed you have a comparison to Orchard - that's me. Look slick we're all building the same thing ><
kylemclaren5 hours ago
Indeed, though slightly different implementations: I decided to lean on shelling out to the CLI
mark_l_watson2 hours ago
Nice, I like the functionality and that it is a tiny native SwiftUI app. I recently wrote a blog [1] on using Apple containers for agentic coding; I just updated it to mention Davit. I so much prefer using Apple containers to using Docker on my two home Macs for personal projects.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/marklwatson/p/running-opencode...
dllrr16 hours ago
I've been a fan of Orbstack for make 2 years or so. Worth the cost for me because it's so well integrated and fast and docker command compatible.
I'll give this a try though.
ttul16 hours ago
I’m guessing the OrbStack team will probably support MacOS native containers soon enough, with all their management goodness on top.
reassess_blind10 hours ago
How does this compare to OrbStack? Do Apple Containers offer anything in the dev experience that I would notice? OrbStack’s implementation already feels lightning fast for my usage.
gempir9 hours ago
[flagged]
internet200017 hours ago
Really nice. Worked perfectly downloading the runtime and running nginx:latest.
It's getting to the point that scrolling down on Github and seeing Claude as a contributor is a signal the app will be good (Native feeling, no Electron, etc)
erdaltoprak5 hours ago
Posted my own take of that here without any traction a few days ago
It supports containers, machines, registries with a menu bar app if anyone is interested by it
ozarkerD16 hours ago
Man I wish Apple would add docker api compatibility to Apple containers
jaffa23 hours ago
Yeah. I don't quite understand this. Can I use this instead of docker desktop, to run docker containers on my mac 'natively' ? Or this is completely separate from docker ?
cpuguy8314 hours ago
This is focused on builds, so running either buildkitd or dockerd in an Apple containerization container. No port forwarding or host volume stuff (really its focused on running buildkit on mac) BUT complete integration with docker CLI and buildx.
scosman2 hours ago
What's the best "run your coding agent in apple containers" setup folks have?
lelandfe17 hours ago
Unrelated. I noticed that the settings window (Cmd-,) text inputs all type from the right instead of the left like older macOS inputs (or web inputs[0])
Is that a thing macOS is moving to? I'm sure I've seen Apple use these too.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
linux264713 hours ago
Yeah it’s an unfortunate SwiftUI thing
pjmlp9 hours ago
> No Electron, no web views, no background agents of its own.
Sweet, regardless of the AI help.
If anything even more so, no excuses for lazy Electron, with AI helping hand.
Kudos.
keremimo9 hours ago
Looks good, Apple Containers is neat except it is just another set of commands we gotta memorize.
I like it! I would like it even more if we could choose which terminal app the containers open in. Is that doable?
neodymiumphish18 hours ago
contained-app includes a Files feature to allow in-container filesystem browsing. Is there any plan to implement this in Davit as well?
Looks like great work, will try it soon!
xinitop12 hours ago
Added this in the latest release.
xinitop17 hours ago
Great suggestion! I'll add this!
jon_adler7 hours ago
Looks nice. Great work. FYI, the gist link 404s under “Can I reach a container by name from my Mac?”.
MoonWalk17 hours ago
I don't know a lot about containers. Would containers created for/with this also work in Docker?
Good name for this app, BTW.
natebc17 hours ago
It claims to be backed by (and require) apple/containers(1) which "consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images" so if all that is true .... yes!
VerifiedReports8 hours ago
Why would someone downvote this perfectly relevant question?
Pathetic.
bbg240119 hours ago
Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:
bluejedi11 hours ago
and https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard but without vibe coding
roger_16 hours ago
Hmm… how does one even pick between multiple vibe coded options?
I like to vet my options before committing to new software but who knows if the authors are gonna support these in a month? I don’t want to waste Fable tokens to fix bugs myself when they crop up.
BergaDev15 hours ago
Ask fable to explore each project and pick the best one lmao
Vibes all the way down
computerdork14 hours ago
Funny!
esafak13 hours ago
Look at the tests, commit and issue activity, number of committers...
Groxx15 hours ago
Kinda interestingly: it zips to 17MB, but the binary looks to be 56MB (davit.app/contents/macos/davit). That seems like a surprising amount of compression for a binary - embedded assets maybe? Possibly this is normal for mac apps though?
Lalabadie14 hours ago
A lot of Mac apps compress like this. Not so long ago, it was pretty common to download a 3-400mb dmg file that decompresses to a 1.5gb app package, for example.
Groxx14 hours ago
A lot of the time that happened, when I checked it was because a lot of the assets were relatively uncompressed, so DMG-compression shrank them considerably. I haven't noticed the binaries themselves being this compressible.
But that's just "noticed", I definitely haven't paid much attention. And don't have a mac nowadays, so I can't go check my hard drive now.
Lalabadie14 hours ago
I'd lean the same way as you (just a hypothesis from me too). A .app on MacOS is just a special kind of directory, so the compression covers the normal file types inside of it.
Localization files compress well, compiled code compresses well, repeating assets (@1x, 2x, 3x) and the pair of binaries in a universal app (x86_64 + arm64) do too, etc.
Ah, and dmg compression is just LZFSE, zlib or bzip2, so pretty standard stuff as far as I understand it.
ballislife3018 hours ago
Docker desktop is a memory hog. What's the memory usage of Davit?
xinitop17 hours ago
With nothing running, the platform's background services idle at roughly 25 MB. Docker desktop starts a single VM to host all containers and will reserve memory to do so. Davit itself is about 25mb and then each container will use the memory up to what you allocate for it.
david_p17 hours ago
I will give this a try!
Docker desktop on mac does not work well (uses lots of resources) and my current alternative is OrbStack (very slick, uses far less resources, but freemium).
sails8 hours ago
Is this possibly a replacement for Orbstack?
siquick15 hours ago
Very nice - would love to see the ability to open a Dockerfile directly in the UI to build/run it.
xinitop12 hours ago
Working on this..
Aejkatappaja6 hours ago
Looks nice!
Will give it a try, you won a star
nvahalik19 hours ago
I really want to use this but am stuck (right now) having to use Caddy's docker tags integration for name resolution.
dofm18 hours ago
Can you not use Avahi in the guest and get zeroconf?
Oh! Do you mean the issue is adding extra name resolution to a VM?
Have you tried this avahi alias trick?
https://gist.github.com/tomslominski/9d507acd4036952d65b2364...
Works like a charm, bit odd that you have a persistent avahi client process broadcasting per alias, but it's lightweight.
nvahalik18 hours ago
Interesting! I will look into this.
mrbnprck19 hours ago
Looks great, does it also come with a menubar integration?
xinitop17 hours ago
It does, doesn't it?
nf-x18 hours ago
Looks neat, need to give it a spin
piosin14 hours ago
Any hosting requirements?
oulipo219 hours ago
How does it compare to something like OrbStack?
LoganDark19 hours ago
OrbStack has its own virtualization layer designed to simulate Docker. Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images
oulipo217 hours ago
Okay, so it allows to run the same image, but is not CLI-compatible with docker that's what you mean? But is it more / less / equivalently efficient ?
xinitop16 hours ago
Docker Desktop/Obstack start a single VM that runs all your containers. This means that you'll have to scale it accordingly. Davit uses Apple Containers that runs a very thin VM for each container you spin up. Depending on your use case it's more, less or equivalently effcient.
armanj15 hours ago
can someone tldr me why choose apple container (and its ui) over docker (and orbstack)
samgranieri13 hours ago
I can’t speak about orbstack, but I’ve worked with docker desktop and podman desktop for years on macOS. Those programs start up a virtual machine that consistently eats ram regardless of whether or not you are running containers in it. Apple container looks lighter weight. In the age of ridiculous ram costs, you gotta save resources.
routelastresort10 hours ago
In addition to memory saver that another person replied about, Docker Desktop also has an MCP server functionality and marketplace (almost all free) and huge AI focus. You can hardly compare it to the others at this point.
I was doing the following at the same time on my MBP this week:
* running a bunch of containers + MCP servers for Claude and Codex on Docker Desktop
* heavily using Claude Code with Fable and packer to build cloud marketplace images
* having Codex write some tests and git flows and reviewing the work in vscode
* automating a character in a Wine-based 1st party RPG in the background running at full resolution
* watching anime on Plex in between Claude Code prompts
It's all about your machine. Docker Desktop is not my worry and if you're a Dev you should have a nice laptop with 32-64GB or more, Apple Silicon Max CPU, etc. This goes for Fusion or UTM also if you want to run a Linux Desktop.
I use docker CE with all container/tui interfaces on all of my Linux systems, but Docker Desktop is nice for macOS or Windows. I almost forgot about Docker Desktop's Gordon, and the AI assistant will do things like analyze your Dockerfile or compose.yml. Super handy.
ClikeX5 hours ago
> if you're a Dev you should have a nice laptop with 32-64GB or more, Apple Silicon Max CPU, etc.
Really depends on what you're building, to be honest.
watermelon010 hours ago
Docker Desktop's memory saver shuts down VM when containers are not running.
Additionally, Docker/Podman/Orbstack start a single VM, where memory is shared between containers.
On the other hand, Apple Containers create a separate VM for each container, which results in higher memory usage due to Linux kernel overhead, as well as the fact that kernel will try to use most of the available memory for file caching.
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dom9617 hours ago
ooh nice
vladsiu11 hours ago
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andrew-waters5 hours ago
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383629364816 hours ago
> Tiny. A single ~17 MB app
Oh goodness what have we come to? I know we're comparing to electron monstrosities, but still
gfiorav16 hours ago
complaining about 17mb in 2026 has to be virtue signaling of some sort...
yes I know we went to the moon with a few kb but are we going to hang on to that for ever?
38362936483 hours ago
I am not complaining about it being 17MB. I am complaining about someone considering it tiny.
nophunphil8 hours ago
How would this be virtue signaling?
Anyway, I think we should want to build efficient things. Dismissing this doesn’t seem terribly productive.
osjdjsjdjwjd13 hours ago
Sigh. Found the Electron developer.
Yes, yes we fucking are.